


under the stained glass sky

by zhuzhting



Category: NINE PERCENT (Band), 乐华七子NEXT | NEX7, 偶像练习生 | Idol Producer (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-15 22:48:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19305406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zhuzhting/pseuds/zhuzhting
Summary: wenjun is always waiting for zhengting and zhengting is always there





	under the stained glass sky

Zhengting remembers moments like wisps of air that blow past him, combing their fingers through his hair and brushing lips against his cheek.

“Meet me?” Wenjun smiles and he’s looking down prettily, lashes long and curled and Zhengting can stare and count his lashes all day. “At the field, before sunset.”

Zhengting hides his smile and keeps it to himself, he’s sure that Wenjun sees it anyways.

He nods, small, that sort of thing that didn’t need words or much thought, Wenjun knew, he always knew.

\---

Zhengting is killed by a man whose face he cannot recall. Zhengting is just at the wrong place at the wrong time. His life was a happenstance. The earth doesn’t cry for him, Zhengting’s tears are dried forever and all the things he’s never spoken freeze in his lungs.

He doesn’t remember dying, or the life leaving him, one of those two feelings he can admit to thinking about before.

One moment he remembers being there, with his clammy palm pressed against Wenjun’s and the kaleidoscope sky spinning around them, lights like stained glass illuminating the most beautiful person he’s ever seen. The next moment he is gone, and Zhengting sits alone under a vibrant sky that seems gray and dull and lifeless.

\---

“Hey,” he whispers into Wenjun’s ear. Wenjun who sits by the windowsill with the soft sunlight making his soft hair glow like a halo around his head.

Wenjun looks up with a shadow of a smile already on his face, ready to creep up, as if always waiting to just step into the light, just for him, just for Zhengting. It retreats, fast and afraid, and a little guilty, like he doesn’t deserve it. Zhengting disagrees, Wenjun deserved all the smiles in the world.

“Hey,” Wenjun whispers back into the air, and it’s a one sided mirror that Zhengting has his palm pressed against, willing it to break into tiny colorful shards of pastel blues and pinks and oranges.

Zhengting and Wenjun sit with their sides pressed against each other. No heat passes between them, and Zhengting digs his nails into skin that’s unfeeling.

\---

Zhengting knows it’s unfair. He knows it isn’t fair that Justin keeps looking for him because the boy can feel his presence despite the police telling him that it’s a lost cause. He knows it isn’t fair that Chengcheng sobs into Zhengting’s bed at night and clings to pillows that aren’t his in hopes of some feeling that isn’t abstract. He knows it isn’t fair that Quanzhe tries not to cry whenever Fuli and Wubaiwan bark too loud at night because they’re looking for an owner that isn’t there. He knows it isn’t fair that Zeren sometimes sits on the roof of the school to scream his throat raw and open and bleeding. He knows it isn’t fair that Xinchun chooses to skip classes again and again to walk the same paths they used to walk together, hoping that some phantom figure would fall in step with him.

He knows it’s so very unfair that Wenjun stays waiting every afternoon on a field, watching the sky turn colored then dark, still always waiting.

Zhengting is unfair and Zhengting is killing them slowly but Zhengting is also afraid.

Because the place across the field is somewhere he never thought of stepping into. It’s cold and alone and dark.

He wants to stay in the light with his friends, he wants to stay in the light with Wenjun.

“They say butterflies carry the souls of those who are gone,” Wenjun speaks into the clouds one day. A butterfly rests on his pant leg, its wings slowly moving open and closed.

“I’m not gone.” Zhengting says, but knows he very well is. He’s not here or there. He’s thankful for the butterfly, it speaks for him. He’s envious, because it’s able to comfort Wenjun.

Maybe it’s his longing, his desperate grab and pull that thrusts him past shattered glass, finally. Wenjun looks up then and, for the first time, someone sees Zhengting. “You’re not.”

Zhengting’s eyes widen. The butterfly flits away in a flurry of wings.

Wenjun reaches out. “Don’t.” Zhengting says and he scrambles away, pushing himself back, out of reach. The flash of hurt that enters and exits Wenjun’s face stabs at his cold, unbeating heart. “If you do that, I’ll have to leave.”

Wenjun pulls his hand back so fast Zhengting almost tries to throw himself forward on instinct. He wants so badly what he can no longer have.

“Where will you go?” This is wrong, so wrong, Zhengting was supposed to be gone.

Zhengting shrugs, looks beyond the field, away and in the distance that he can no longer see. “I don’t know.”

They sit there with their eyes on each other and the sky moving above them.

“Meet me here?” Wenjun says finally, when he has to go live his life again. Zhengting remembers doing the same like pictures hung on walls, glimpses into what once was in snapshots of clarity. He remembers how it felt more than how it was. “Tomorrow?”

Zhengting holds the secrets of the world in his smile as he nods. He hopes Wenjun still understands.

He does.

\---

Zhengting doesn’t leave the field but he sees his friends in the bubbles that float in the air.

Zhengting wants them to be okay.

They aren’t okay.

They aren’t okay and Zhengting spends his day holding bubbles carefully close to his chest, whispering sweet nothings to images that will never hear them. Oh how he hopes his friends hear them.

\---

Wenjun walks into the field with grace and poise that doesn’t tell of the grief on his shoulders. Zhengting knows him all too well.

“Why did you go?” Why did you die? Wenjun never says that word, it tastes too real on his tongue.

“I wish I didn’t.” Zhengting digs his hands into the soil beneath him. He wonders if he leaves an imprint on the earth. He really, really hopes that he does. “Believe me.”

Wenjun never looks away from his face, memorizing the lines like taking a photograph. “I believe you.”

\---

There are days when they just sit in silence, and there are days when Wenjun rambles too long. Zhengting loves every day like it was his last. His last day was long past him now.

“Where are you?” Wenjun’s fingers twitch in his lap, Zhengting wants to hold them in his own.

“I don’t know.” The palms of Zhengting’s hands feel hot, the rumbling of an earth on fire under his fingertips. “I’m here.”

There are more nights than days sometimes. And they feel like they stretch on forever, Wenjun not being there, and it’s dark and scary and Zhengting wants to leave.

But the field is his sanctuary.

“Stay.” He tells Wenjun once, after dark.

Wenjun does and they count the stars with their hands stretched out to touch them.

The nights aren’t so scary after that.

\---

The final day is something that Zhengting can say he sees coming. His friends aren’t okay.

His friends aren’t okay because he’s still in his field.

Wenjun walks into the field like he always does, grace and poise, and everything Zhengting ever wanted.

“Can I kiss you?” He asks and Zhengting is afraid.

But he wants his so, so bad. It hurts.

He steps in closer than he had ever dared, their breaths a quiet whisper of things they never needed to say. “Kiss me.” Zhengting whispers.

Wenjun twines their fingers together when they do, and it’s soft and painful, and sweeter than anything.

Zhengting didn’t know that the dead cried.

They sky continues to move above them, and Zhengting finds himself no longer unmoving underneath it.

**Author's Note:**

> hello, this is more word vomit than anything else. i just needed to get back into the groove of writing tbh and what better way to do that than to write biting angst. happy anniversary to nex7. i might not post anything for a while though since i'm so busy with school.
> 
> anyways, you guys know how it is, yell at [me](https://twitter.com/zhuzhting)


End file.
